NASA partnership with Google results in discovery of new planet

January 4, 2018

Google’s machine learning technology proved useful to discover a sun-like star thousands of light years away from Earth. Called Kepler-90i due to its orbit around Kepler-90, the exoplanet represents the eighth one of its kind in the Kepler-90 system. NASA Researchers Christopher Shallue and Andrew Vanderburg trained Google AI to learn how to process and analyze the mass of data collected by the Kepler Space Telescope. Shallue remarked, “Machine learning really shines in situations where there is so much data that humans can’t search it for themselves,” while NASA’s Paul Hertz affirmed, “This finding shows that our data will be a treasure trove available to innovative researchers for years to come.”